Join Broken Paragraphs HTMl Regex

Question

I'm trying to edit some xhtml on Sigil.

With the command

< p>([a-z])

I'm able to find all paragraphs that begin with lower case. That tells me that they shouldn't be separate from the previous one. It's just a conversion issue.

What should I do to delete both the < p> from that paragraph and the < /p> from the previous one in order to join the two blocks of text into one single paragraph?

It looks something like this:

< p> ... that is why relationships< /p>

< p> are not what they should be.

And it should be:

< p> that is why relationships are not what they should be.< /p>

Answer 1

I'm not too sure about Sigil, but the following regex should be able to do that:

First find:

</p>\s*<p>(\s*[a-z])

The replace it with:

$1

What this means:

\s* : Any amount of whitespace

$1 : The group () youll keep after replacing

Answer 2

Or an easiest way by checking Dot Matches All:

<p>(.+?)</p>

And then you Replace only with: $1 or /1 (Group)

It will remain only the block of text.

(.+?) - Everything until the first entity like slashes or > etc.

(.*?) - Everything including entities. (Careful!)

Build your regex:

• if you have newlines use \n
• if you have space use \s
• if you want to exclude something use ^
• if you want to use both \n and \s go (\n\s)
• if you want ANY of that use * after it. Ex: \s* (any white space until first entity)
• if you want to search by first letter go ([a-z]) or all letters ([a-z]+)
• by numbers ([0-9]) or more numbers ([0-9]+)

• only 2 first letters ([a-z]{2}) etc.

  Advices:

• Always USE preview or replace only the first match to see the difference.
• Use them into groups with brackets ()

Hope this helps you understand better your issue.